Thought Box

It’s been a while since I’ve had some time to get a post up, and one of the reasons why is because I have been spending a lot of time preparing for the Omniture Web Analytics Competition at BYU. For those who don’t know, I’m taking a Web Analytics class this semester and we’re encouraged (maybe required?) to participate in the competition. This was my second semester participating in the competition, but unfortunately we worked with the same website’s data. Though you’d think I had an advantage, being familiar with http://www.costumecraze.com/, the Omniture people made it clear at the opening meeting that we needed to come in with new information this time around.

I can’t share any specific information due to my signing a non-disclosure agreement, but I can talk a bit about the SiteCatalyst product! To be completely honest, SiteCatalyst is an absolutely fabulous tool that still needs a little work. Currently, you have great flexibility and customization available to you (though sometimes you end up paying quite a bit more for some of those options) as an Omniture customer. The task of keeping up with all of your key performance indicators is pretty simple with the advanced dashboards you can create. From my experience, which is admittedly little, SiteCatalyst blows the competition away in sophistication and the level of customization available. Granted, those who use Omniture’s tools are paying out the nose, so SiteCatalyst better be good.

I do, however, have a few complaints. Omniture has broken up their reports into three main sections: Commerce, Traffic, and Paths. This is really helpful in some regards because it breaks up the many reports available into three different categories, yet I found myself extremely frustrated on several occasions. Because these three categories are very rigidly constructed, getting reports on data from both traffic and commerce is impossible (or at least hard enough to seem so). For example, should I want to find a report that gave me the percentage of site traffic that came from a specific domain and the revenue from that domain I would be out of luck. For some questions you can look up two different reports within their respective categories, but this is not always the case.

Without giving out specific information, I was trying to do research on CostumeCraze’s global presence (where commerce and traffic were coming from geographically) and I could not find reports that really helped me drill down on the issue. SiteCatalyst provides traffic maps, showing which countries around the world are providing site traffic, but I could not find anything that would help me see the revenue that matched up with that traffic. The data already being tracked, so why can’t I get to the information I need? There were ways to work around the problem, sort of, but I’d rather just have interoperability between the three categories.

Omniture does offer other services, and it’s entirely possible that Discover (a new app they use) or another piece of software solves some of the problems I see in SiteCatalyst. Unfortunately, I haven’t had access to any of the more advanced tools, but I can probably research it a little bit. Either way, web analytics is a pretty interesting and I encourage those who are web developers to look into Google’s free analytics tools (http://www.google.com/analytics).

So, I don’t want to give everyone the idea that I’m obsessed with iTunes or the iTunes store. In all honesty, I HATE the iTunes store for a bunch of reasons, but the merits of the iTunes software far outweigh the problems. The reason I love iTunes is because of one simple feature that makes my life of digital addiction so much easier: the “Keep iTunes Folder Organized” option (found in the Advanced Preferences menu).The reason I love this is because it eliminates a large portion of the time it takes me to add new media to my archives. I have a very specific location for all the the media that iTunes accesses, and by simply dragging files onto the iTunes interface I can automatically move them to the directory, rename each individual file, create a new folder for the individual albums and artists, and now I can also download the album art as long as I have the artist and album named properly.

To me, it is pretty great to have software that does all of the file archiving and organization for me. Why is this so cool? It’s cool because I don’t have to waste an average of 15 minutes renaming all of my song titles, creating appropriate folders for each artist and then each album for each artist. I also don’t have to try and find the album art somewhere online and then point each individual song file to that image. This saves a ton of time, especially if you’re adding a whole slew of media to your iTunes browser at one time.The main reason I bring this up is because I just recently downloaded Picasa (see their website) and it does not meet all of my expectations and wildest dreams.

I guess Apple has me a little spoiled by the way iTunes is designed, but why can’t other software houses develop stuff that works this well? The interface that Picasa uses looks like it would be very conducive to the same types of folder organization that iTunes can do, but either I have yet to find the ability to do it or it simply is a mirage of potential. I have over 2000 images on my computer that I would like to archive and keep organized. Picasa does an amazing job of letting me do some minor edits really quickly, and has a pretty nice interface for uploading all sorts of NEW images from a scanner or digital camera, but what about my older images from the days of high school and pre-mission mayhem?I know I may be asking a little much of all of the software jedis out there (My favorite being THE Software Jedi), but when you’re building software that is used for media manipulation and display you should really consider adding a bit of code that will properly archive my stuff. Obviously it needs to be a non-default option (since you’ll make a ton of people, including myself, angry at you for moving stuff before asking), but I think it should be a very important and standard thing to include. Though Picasa lets me do some of the little things that I find helpful, the most helpful thing it could do is help me archive my files. Even if it allowed proper drag/drop capabilities I would be pretty happy, but it does not properly (at least with my noob experience) let you do this very effectively.

It sounds pretty funny to read me go over something as strange as a specific feature in software, but for those who don’t know me well, I definitely have an interest in how software is developed. I’ve been trying to get my foot in the door as a program manager at Microsoft, and hopefully my general thoughts on things like this will help me wrap my mind around the different aspects of software design.